myrmepropagandist
I need to find a good excuse to tell my students about all of the secret hidden rivers of NYC.
You see, before the city was developed there were streams and brooks all over the place. Why do they call it BROOKlyn? Ever think about that?
Anyways, when people drained the intertidal swamps and wetlands to pack in more buildings and people they buried the streams.
People are often surprised that we can't simply ...delete a stream. But water is powerful and water will flow, you must give it space.
myrmepropagandist
Also, as we discover from time to time, NYC will simply fill up with water if it rains too quickly. This summer there were flash floods as all the hidden rivers spilled over their walls and tunnels making themselves known to a city determined to ignore them.
The ability to manage and work with (not against) water is the foundation of "having a civilization" ... in NYC we have riches beyond the wildest dreams of other cities. We have so much fresh water and we have the sea!
myrmepropagandist
The abundance of rivers is the very thing that drew so many people to this location. It's what makes this a special place. It seems a shame to bury them and ignore them.
myrmepropagandist
All those rivers are still flowing, only underground in tunnels.
They still feed the trees, though not as well.
It would be possible to daylight portions of the brooks again in parks, they could surface for a bit then go back under. I happen to like this idea very much.
If you look for the signs you can find one near where you live. The secret underground rivers that nobody thinks about except for the engineers who get nightmares from their power.
They can tear your buildings down!
myrmepropagandist
Thinking about all the buried rivers and brooks and how they cannot be contained forever, how they can be covered but never erased or deleted is a great comfort to me lately.
The water will flow.
David Njoku
@futurebird I remember a David Attenborough documentary about plants from a few years ago. They sped up plants' movements and it made everything they do seem intentional. Sped up, you can see how vines reach around "looking" for branches to climb, for instance.
It revealed - or seemed to reveal - that plants think and act, and the only reason we don't realise it is that they operate on a different timescale from us.
myrmepropagandist
Based on the book I'm reading about plants, it turns out that many of the trees and plants can probably still *hear* these hidden rivers flowing, and the roots seek the sound of the water. Sometimes they pry open the pipes causing all sorts of trouble.
13 barn owls in a trenchcoat
@funkula
That is two of us!
Mobile Suit Larry
@pbloem @futurebird yeah I was immediately reminded of the Rivers of London series, an urban fantasy where the spirits of the hidden rivers are major characters
Peter Bloem
@futurebird London has these too. One of them flows through a metro station, above the trains.
https://metro.co.uk/2024/01/28/london-underground-station-secret-river-running-right-20185034/
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